Mary Gartside

Mary Gartside (c. 1755-1819) was an English water colourist and colour theorist. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Mary Gartside can be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published his short but important Natural System of Colours around 1766, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s highly influential theory Zur Farbenlehre, first published in 1810.[1] Gartside's colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual. She is the first recorded woman known to have published a theory of colour.

Mary Gartside
Bornc. 1755
Manchester and London, England
Died1819
NationalityEnglish
Known forPainting Botany Colour theory
MovementNeoclassicism and Romanticism

Biography

Mary Gartside exhibited some of her own art work, paintings of flowers in watercolour, at the Royal Academy in 1781, at the Botanic Gardens in Liverpool in 1784, and at the Associated Artists in Water-Color in London in 1808. Mary Gartside died near Ludlow on 9 December 1819, aged 64.[2]

Published works
An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General - p47

Between 1805 and 1808 Mary Gartside published three books on painting in watercolour that reflect her interest in colour theory and its applicability. They were, in chronological order: An Essay on Light and Shade, privately published in 1805; Ornamental Groups, Descriptive of Flowers, Birds, Shells, Fruit, Insects etc,. published by William Miller in 1808; and the second, enlarged edition of her first book with the new title An Essay on a New Theory of Colour, published by Gardiner, Miller and Arch in 1808. New Theory of Colour was intended as the first of a three-volume set, but volumes 2 and 3 never appeared. A 10-page pamphlet appears to have preceded An Essay on Light and Shade, and is titled An Essay on Light and Shadow. It does not contain the hand-coloured blots included in the later editions. Mary Gartside also completed two drawings that were published in the third volume of the book Illustrations of Natural History by Dru Drury.[3]

Review and commentary

One of the first scholars to have referenced and discussed her was Frederic Schmid in his book The Practice of Painting (London: Faber and Faber, 1948) and a related essay. Her work has recently been discussed by scholars such as Ian C. Bristow,[4] Ann Bermingham,[5] Martin Kemp,[6] Jean-Jacques Rosat [7] and Raphael Rosenberg.[8] In 2009, Alexandra Loske presented a paper on Gartside's life and work at a research conference in Lewes, United Kingdom.

In 2013, a copy of An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General was included in the exhibition Regency Colour and Beyond, 1785-1850 at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.[9] Curator Alexandra Loske produced a blog post about this rare book on the Royal Pavilion's official blog,[10] in which all eight colour blots can be seen. A complete set of the blots has also been reproduced in Alexandra Loske's Colour: A Visual History.[11] Since 2020, Mary Gartside has been featuring in a research project, led by Alexandra Loske) at the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR) at the University of Sussex about women in colour history.[12] In January 2020 this project was presented by Loske as a research paper at the University of Edinburgh.[13]

Selected works
  • An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General (London, 1805)
  • An Essay on a New Theory of Colours, and on Composition in General (London, 1808)
  • Ornamental Groups, Descriptive of Flowers, Birds, Shells, Fruit, Insects, &c., and Illustrative of a New Theory of Colouring (London, W. Miller, 1808)

References
  1. Loske, Alexandra "Mary Gartside - A female colour theorist in Georgian England" in St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 2010 Volume 14 pp. 17-30
  2. death notices in Sun 25 Dec 1861 and Hereford Journal 22 Dec 1819 accessed via British Newspaper Archive 15 Jan 2021
  3. Calhoun, John V. "The original drawings for Dru Drury's Illustrations of Natural History (1770-1782) are rediscovered in rural Virginia". News of the Lepidopterists' Society. 64 (2): 64–72.
  4. Bristow, Ian C., Architectural Colour in British Interiors 1615-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996)
  5. Bermingham, Ann, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 215-227.
  6. Kemp, Martin, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London: Yale, 1990)
  7. Rosat,J. "Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Somewhere between science, art and philosophy" The Letter of the Collège de France (Letter 17), 25 November 2005
  8. Rosenberg, R., and Max Hollein, Turner – Hugo – Moreau. Entdeckung der Abstraktion (Munich, Hirmer Verlag, 2006)
  9. "Regency Colour and Beyond, 1785–1850". www.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2014.
  10. "Last chance to see one of the rarest and most unusual books about colour ever published: Mary Gartside's an Essay on Light and Shade from 1805 | Royal Pavilion & Brighton Museums". Archived from the original on 27 April 2014. Retrieved 26 April 2014.
  11. Colour: A Visual History (Tate, Ilex, 2019)
  12. "Squaring the Colour Circle: the lives and work of women in colour history : Research and conferences : Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research : University of Sussex". www.sussex.ac.uk.
  13. "History of Art Research Seminar: Squaring the colour circle: Pioneering women in colour literature and theory | Edinburgh College of Art". www.eca.ed.ac.uk.
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